Yellow Wallpaper\" by Charlotte Perkins

Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a first person short story from the end of the nineteen-century. It tells the story of a woman that reaches various states of delusion and madness while following a treatment of isolation. Although seen as an early feminist piece by most of the literary community, the story has also been catalogued as a Gothic and horror fiction piece. Yet, the most important difference in analysis this text is the collision of many critiques that suggest this to be a feminist piece, and the author herself, that clearly states the reasons for which she created this were purely medical.

Before going into an analysis of the various interpretations and meanings, a summary of the story is essential as to better understand the various steps and processes that the main character faces.

The narrator starts the journal with a description of the house that her husband rented for the summer. She connects the strangeness of the large aristocratic house that is empty, to her difficult marriage with a doctor that is not paying too much attention to her feelings and illness. The differences between them are obvious when she portrays him as a very practical character with a strong grip on reality, and her as an idealistic inner-oriented person. The treatment that her husband prescribed for her condition requires not only isolation from society but also a restriction on her freedom of writing or any other activity that would necessitate effort. In an apparent mental illness caused by a missed labor, the woman is forced to follow this treatment, which is in total opposition to a self-perceived free spirit, eager to work and interact with people.

By writing various notes in her journal, the women can relive her mind and communicate in an active manner with someone, even if it is only with her. She describes the house in high details and finds many objects as being disturbing, especially the window bars and the patterned model on the room walls. Hiding the journal from her husband she also closes more and more from him and goes back to the notes as her form of communication and self-preservation.

As days pass, she gives more and more importance to the yellow wallpaper, which she finds disturbing and even menacing. She writes about John's concerns about her fixation with the models and the color of the wallpaper and begins to create an entire universe around it. Before realizing that the repeated models on the wall have a space, which is different than the rest, her writings are interrupted by her sister in law, Jennie, who is also the housekeeper and nurse for her.

As if she finds herself in a prison, the narrator finds the yellow wallpaper as her guardian. Developing a form of Stockholm syndrome, she begins to indulge the wallpaper and find it less and less disgusting. As her hours grow more and more boring and empty, as no activity is allowed, she finds herself contemplating on the wallpaper and making it the object of her total attention. The patterns she imagines seeing transform into a woman that stoops down and creeps behind a pattern looking like bar cages.

As the wallpaper becomes the main source of interests, this also bring a large amount of possessive feelings towards it. Finding out what the pattern of the yellow wall represents becomes the one and only desire, even higher than her conflictual need to leave the house. No one else is allowed to look at the paper or touch it in any form. Sleeping less and less she becomes more tranquil and focused on inner thoughts, a sign her husband identifies as an improvement of her condition.

She sees in the wallpaper a woman that tries to get out of a cage, from behind the wall and paper that keep her imprisoned. She finds herself forced to free the woman and even identifies herself with her. As night comes, she feels trapped in the wall, alongside many of the other women she sees daily. She stops also looking out the window, as her fantasies are present there as well.

Tearing and pulling off the paper from the walls becomes the only way in which she can escape the wall and be free in her real life prison, which is the room. Not wanting to leave the security of the room, she locks herself inside and frees herself and her alter ego from the wall. She creeps on the floor and even after her husband faints seeing her, she goes over him, as she is unable to stop the repetitive move.

Large parts of the people that analyze this story refer to it as a guiding story for the fight with the male figure, both in literature and in real life. The beginning of the feminist interpretation appears in 1973 when Elaine Hedges in "Feminist Writers" and continues after with Jeannette King and Pam Morris that acknowledge the resurgence of feministic interpretation. In the feminist approach, the story looks at man as judges and gate keepers of women in their social and family imprisonment. In creating a passive and docile environment men, like John, use various techniques from manipulation to threats and incarceration to control women. The environment in which the "The Yellow Wallpaper" is forced to live seen as a metaphor to the way women were forced to behave in society, under the control of men and with their freedoms and creativity crushed or subject to rules. (Papke, 1995)

One distinctive association could be made between the feminist explanation the text and reality. It deals with the context of when the story was written, in a time when women literature was slowly beginning to create a strong voice and fiction was becoming more and more important in creating a strong image of women. Not being allowed by a man to write makes the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" frustrated to the point where she had to hide the fact that she writes and to find comfort in finding a way to free herself from this imprisonment -- one similar to the imprisonment of women in the social environment in which rules were dictated by men, for men. On the other hand, the fact that she was not allowed to write should be seen as the attempt to destroy any possibility of her continuing in her delusions, something that is more palpable as an explanation.

The process of dissociation from real life is a classical step of many mental illness and obviously, could be analyzed in a feminist manner. On the other hand, the author has explained the purposes of the story and such analysis could only be made to create a tool of the text and even see if it has had some effects on women in the time it was created.

From a feminist perspective, the story has relevance, yet it would be an exaggeration to presume that the author was aiming to write with this purpose. As she said in her explanation of why she wrote this, her main goal was to show the negative effects of solitude and social isolation on various cases of mental illness, stressing the fact that more activity and not less, more interaction and more complexity, instead of repetitive actions are needed. Based on her own experience, the short story aims to give an opposite treatment for the end of the nineteen-century rest cure, which almost made her to become insane. (Gilman, 2003)